In a satellite phone call before heading out into the desert, Hallock had been able to tell his family that he’d been designated for a support assignment. He was the youngest gunner in the company, the member of the four-man team in each tank responsible for scanning for enemies and firing when one was identified. Hallock spent his 20th birthday “somewhere in the desert” in Saudi Arabia, as his company familiarized itself with the Abrams, a replacement for the older M60. In November 1990, four months after Saddam Hussein had taken Kuwait City ostensibly over an oil dispute, the Bravo Company, 4th Tank Battalion, 4th Marine Division was mobilized from headquarters in Yakima. They haven’t called the reserves up since World War II,’” Hallock said, mimicking the fateful words of that recruiter. “’You don’t have anything to worry about, ma’am. Hallock slipped into a Southern drawl to recall the words of comfort the Marine Reserve recruiter told his mother when she went with him to sign her son up at age 17. “At his age, I was over in the Gulf, getting ready to fight a war.” Not a great start “He wants to go in the Marines, he’s in the process of signing up for the Marines right now. It’s kind of a weird feeling,” Hallock said. But the 30-year anniversary of the battle, which brought an end to the first Gulf War, has their thoughts returning to the sands of the desert and the dangers of war. “We’re more worried about, ‘Are we going to have something going on this weekend? Are we going to have a party?’ “īoth men later found jobs with the Spokane Police Department. “We’re in college,” said Meidl, who’s served as Spokane’s chief of police since September 2016. That included Hallock, an Olympia native enrolled at Washington State University in Pullman, and another reservist, 19-year-old Craig Meidl.
The decision to deploy Marine reservists in the push to Kuwait City meant that a company headquartered in Yakima was sent into the desert.
“I found it interesting that many of them were already being covered up by the sand,” he said. ABOVE: After the four-day battle, Brad Hallock and his company returned to the area where they’d been in conflict to see husks of destroyed Soviet tanks driven by the Iraqi soldiers.
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